Mysterious Illness Kills Dozens of Children in Indonesian Village

FILE – Mosquito nets helped control malaria after an outbreak in the late 1990s. Today, a mysterious illness initially thought to be malaria has hit Papua, killing at least 41 children within three weeks.

Fatiyah Wardah

November 30, 2015 4:26 PM

JAKARTA—A mysterious illness in Indonesia has killed dozens of children in a village in the remote eastern province of Papua in the past three weeks, leading to charges that the government has failed to take aggressive action.

41 kids die from mystery
disease in Papua

A large number of children, many below the age of seven, have died of an unexplained disease in Mbuwa district, Nduga regency, Papua, following the start of the rainy season in early November.

A medical team consisting of health workers from Nduga, Wamena and Jayawijaya regencies arrived at the location but have yet to ascertain the cause of the deaths.

“As many as 41 children have died, as of today. They present with a slight illness at first but die shortly after these initial signs. The medical team from Nduga Health Office, assisted by the Wamena Health Office may have returned home, but the cause of these deaths remains uncertain,” said Mbuwa district chief Erias Gwijangge, during a call to The Jakarta Post on Monday.

Erias said Nduga and surrounding areas had experienced drought and were exposed to haze from forest fires. Rain only fell in the past month. When the rain began, a number of livestock, such as pigs and poultry, also died abruptly.

“Many of the children died prior to the livestock but there was no report of child fatalities, only in the last three days,” said Erias.

When contacted by the Post, Wamena City community health clinic analysis member Yan Hubi, who joined the trip to Mbuwa district, said his clinic analyzed blood samples of the children to find out if the children had been infected by malaria, but all were negative.

Yan returned to Mbuwa on Nov. 17. A doctor and several other medical workers are also continuing to conduct medical treatment in Mbuwa.

Mysterious polio-like illness affects kids in California

Sofia Jarvis, 4, of Berkeley, Calif., was struck by a polio-like illness when she was 2. It left her with a paralyzed arm

by ELIZABETH WEISE / USA Today

Posted on February 23, 2014 at 5:29 PM

A mysterious polio-like syndrome has affected as many as 25 California children, leaving them with paralyzed limbs and little hope of recovery.

“What’s we’re seeing now is bad. The best-case scenario is complete loss of one limb, the worst is all four limbs, with respiratory insufficiency, as well. It’s like the old polio,” said Keith Van Haren, a pediatric neurologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.

The first known case appeared in 2012. Sofia Jarvis in Berkeley began to experience wheezing and difficulty breathing. The 2-year-old spent days in the intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital Oakland. Doctors thought she had asthma.

“As we were leaving the doctor’s office, I noticed that she went to grab something with her left arm and she stopped, midway,” Tomei said.

Eventually Sofia was brought to Van Haren’s clinic with “a unique set of symptoms.” She was treated with steroids and intravenous immunoglobulin therapy, used to reduce the severity of infections by giving the body antibodies to protect against bacteria and viruses. “None of it helped,” said Van Haren, a neurology professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“He told us right away that the prognosis was really poor and that she’s not going to get better,” Tomei said.

The diagnosis proved correct. Today, at age 4, Sofia’s left arm is paralyzed and she has some weakness in her left leg as well as slight breathing issues.

Still, parents shouldn’t panic. “This is really very rare,” Van Haren said. “But we are asking any families who notice a sudden onset of weakness to see their doctors immediately. Their doctors should contact the California Department of Public Health.”

California is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to see if there are cases outside California. So far none have been reported.

Overall Sofia’s family is grateful. “She’s still with us, she’s still running around, she’s going to preschool,” her mother said.

The case galvanized Van Haren and other neurologists, who worried a new disease had appeared. When they began to go through recent medical files, they found two more cases, both in the San Francisco Bay area.

Polio-like disease seen in California children

A doctor gives an eight-week-old baby the polio vaccine. The children in California had been vaccinated against polio. Photograph: Alamy

A polio-like illness has afflicted a small number of children in California since 2012, causing severe weakness or rapid paralysis in one or more limbs.

The Los Angeles Times reported that state public health officials had been investigating the illness since a doctor requested polio testing for a child with severe paralysis in 2012. Since then, similar cases have sporadically been reported throughout the state.

Dr Carol Glaser, leader of a California department of public health team investigating the illnesses, said she was concerned about the request because polio had been eradicated in the US and the child had not travelled overseas.

The symptoms sometimes occur after a mild respiratory illness. Glaser said a virus that is usually associated with respiratory illness but which has also been linked to polio-like illnesses had been detected in two of the patients.

Firefighters and emergency crews are at a loss to explain what made at least 16 adults fall ill at a children’s store in Fort Worth, Texas on Saturday afternoon. Emergency services were called to the Buy Buy Baby store at 4650 Southwest Loop 820 in Fort Worth twice on Saturday. The patients reported feeling dizzy, headaches and vomiting. The Fort Worth fire department said that when the initial call came in, two employees complained they weren’t feeling well and one became nauseous. The scene was cleared and business resumed. Then, about an hour later, the number who had fallen ill had risen. The store was cleared and fans were brought in to clear the air inside the facility. A fire department spokesman said carbon monoxide had been ruled out as the cause of the illnesses. No children were hurt, all of the patients were between 20-40 years of age, reports Nbcdfw.com. Nine employees and four shoppers were transported to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth for medical evaluations. Three people refused medical treatment. There were no complaints from shoppers or staff at neighboring stores.

Biohazard name:

Unidentified illness

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

Of those, almost 150 dolphins found dead on beaches or in marshes were premature, stillborn or neonatal bottlenose.

In the seven years before 2010, the northern Gulf each year saw an average 63 bottlenose dolphin strandings, incidents where injured or sick marine mammals come ashore.

That the number of dolphin deaths continues to be higher than before 2010 worries Teri Rowles, who heads NOAA’s investigation team.

“This is the longest unusual mortality event nationally,” she said of the dolphin deaths.

The dolphin deaths began their climb before the Deepwater Horizon disaster April 20, 2010, but the oil spill is being considered as a cause. Bacteria and biotoxins, such as red tide, also are being investigated as factors contributing to the deaths.

Scientists don’t know the full scope of the die-off because they rely on field reports of deaths. Not all dead dolphins wash up on populated beaches and waterways where they can be recovered, so many deaths may be going uncounted.

Bacteria culprit

In fall 2011, NOAA scientists confirmed that brucella bacteria killed five dolphins found off of the coast of Louisiana.

And as of Dec. 9, some 13 out of 56 stranded dolphins tested positive or suspected positive for brucella.

Many of the dolphins found dead are too decomposed to test for the bacteria, Rowles said.

Scientists are looking deeply into whether brucella, a common bacteria also found in livestock, has become more lethal in dolphins in the northern Gulf.

Brucella in marine mammals was first recognized in the 1990s and seems to be endemic in many marine mammal populations globally, according to NOAA scientists. But the significance of the bacteria that causes miscarriages, brain infections, pneumonia, and skin and bone infections, is still unknown.

Volcanic Activity

Volcanic activity on Mount Yasur on Tanna Island in Vanuatu, which has been erupting for hundreds of years, has intensified. The Vanuatu Geohazards Observatory has raised its warning regarding Yasur to level two, with expectations of ash and rock falls around the mountain. The volcano reached a level three rating last year, but Vanuatu Geohazards Observatory manager Esline Garaebiti says a threat of that extent is unlikely. However she says people still need to stay clear of the mountain. “This volcano is quite special and the activity is so strong that we maintain it in level two for quite some time and if the explosions are becoming very strong and the projections go further out from the parking area then we will raise the level to level three.”

By Evan Ramstad

Damage from Typhoon Bolaven in North Korea, photographed near Komdok on Aug. 31 by KCNA, released Sept. 7 to EPA for international distribution.

Just as another typhoon headed toward the Korean peninsula, North Korea on Friday summarized the damage from the late summer storm season – 300 dead and another 600 injured or missing.

North Korea’s state news agency said that the worst damage came from the typhoon called Bolaven that swept over the peninsula on Aug. 28 and 29.

That storm alone killed 59 people and left about 26,320 people homeless after about 8,000 houses were destroyed by rain and flooding.

For a country that is so poor and inefficient that each year’s summer storms leave it a disastrous wreck, North Korea provides strikingly precise data about the damage.

Since mid-June, storms and floods damaged or destroyed 87,280 homes and left 298,050 people homeless, its news agency said.

It did not say whether they were temporarily homeless from, say, floodwater, or indeed needed entire new homes.

Among the other damage, 92 drinking water systems were ravaged and 16,900 trees knocked down. “More than 17,150 square meters of railroad were washed away and over 300 sections of railway [were] covered by landslides, with scores of tunnels and railway bridges damaged,” it said.

Now comes Typhoon Sanba, which is heading north from the Philippines toward Okinawa this weekend and the Korean peninsula by Monday. It is a stronger storm than Bolaven, which was billed as the biggest in a decade but didn’t turn out that way.Stars and Stripes reporter Dave Ornauer on Okinawa warns that he’s never seen a storm as intense as Sanba is shaping up to be.

By the time it hits the Korean peninsula, its winds will have died down from Category 4 to Category 2 speeds, he estimates. Even so, both South and North Korea are well-saturated. And North Korea is in no shape for another big storm.

One people got injured and several establishments were partially damaged when a tornado hit a town in Zamboanga Sibugay early today, local officials said. The tornado, which is locally called “buhawi”, hit Poblacion village, the town center of Kabasalan town about 3:30 a.m today, said Mayor George Cainglet. According to the responding police, a driver of a bicycle cab identified as Bebot Baricua, got injured when a flying debris hit him on the street, making him the only victim of the tornado. Besides him, the roofs of the public market, particularly under the wet section, and the roof of the garage area of the town police center were also tore by the tornado, the police added. “The damage was minimal but the residents went panic as a result of the sudden weather disturbance,” disaster officer Adriano Fuego told the press. The authorities estimated that the total damage caused by the tornado is just P200,000 (about $4,800), and the business at the public market was temporarily halted due to the disaster.

Northern Taiwan has seen heavy rainfall Saturday due to the combined effects of seasonal winds and a nearby typhoon, the Central Weather Bureau said. Moisture carried by seasonal winds from the northeast, together with the outer rim of Typhoon Sanba, has caused significant downpours in Taipei City, New Taipei City, Taoyuan County and Yilan County. Xindian District in New Taipei was the hardest-hit area, recording accumulated precipitation of 296 millimeters between midnight and 3 p.m. Saturday, bureau data showed. Rainfall in the areas is likely to continue until Sunday, causing daily minimum temperatures to drop to around 23 degrees Celsius, forecasters said. Meanwhile, strong winds reaching 100 kilometers per hour could be felt in coastal areas across the island due to influence from nearby Sanba. However, the typhoon is not expected to pose further threats to the island as it is heading toward the Ryukyu Islands, the bureau said. As of 2 p.m., Sanba was centered 720 km east of Hualien County in eastern Taiwan, moving at a speed of 23 kph in a north-northwesterly direction. It was packing sustained winds of 191 kph, with gusts reaching 234 kph, the bureau said.

Parts of Manila were under six feet (1.8 metres) of floodwater on Saturday after heavy rain lashed the capital overnight, forcing more than 400 people to flee their homes, officials said. There was also a strong typhoon lurking in the region, and although it was moving away from the Philippines and towards Japan, forecasters said it was adding to the wild weather. “Typhoon (Sanba) has no direct effect but the storm enhanced the southwestern monsoon so we will continue to experience rains,” said government meteorologist Gary de la Cruz. Low-lying coastal areas of the capital were hardest hit, forcing people to leave their homes, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said. At least 10 domestic flights were cancelled and universities in affected areas called off classes, the council said.

Landslides triggered by heavy overnight rain in the hills caused extensive damage in six tea gardens, while the National Highway 31A which was blocked was cleared by the Border Roads Organisation on Saturday. Work had to be stopped for the day in Takdah and Lopchu gardens because of the landslide, while Bannockburn, Phoobshering, Ging and Pussimbing reported loss of tea bushes, Darjeeling Tea Association (DTA) Principal Secretary, Sandip Mukherjee said. “Takdah received around 18 inches of rainfall in the last 24 hours. A 40ft road in Takdah has been washed away in four places and five culverts have been damaged in landslides. There is no approach road to the garden factory now,” Mukherjee said. He said 13 labour quarters and two culverts were affected by the landslides at Lopchu. “Tea bushes in an acre have been uprooted in Lopchu and road connectivity within the garden has become a major problem. Given the extent of the damage, no work could be carried out in Lopchu,” he said. Road communication in the Ging tea garden, about 20km from Darjeeling, was hit after three culverts were damaged. “In Phoobshering, 6,500 tea bushes have been uprooted by the landslides. There is no approach road to the factory now. Water has also seeped into the garden factory,” he said. He alleged that constructions under the 100-days work scheme aggravated the situation in the tea gardens. District Magistrate Saumitra Mohan said “The NH31A was blocked at Tarkhola, Melli and Kalijhora but all major roads have been cleared of debris with the help of agencies like the Border Roads Organisation and the public works department.” Mohan, also the principal secretary of the GTA, said an order has been issued to all subdivisional officers and block divisional officers, that any project was to be cleared only after taking into account environmental concerns and technical viability.

At least 20 people were killed as dozens of houses collapsed following a cloudburst in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in north India on Friday. Several people are feared trapped under the debris and rescue operations have been launched, Disaster Management and Mitigation department officials said citing initial reports. According to officials, incessant rains since Thursday followed by a cloudburst in the wee hours Friday have left a trail of destruction in Timada, Sansari, Giriya, Chunni and Mangali villages in the district. River Saryu and Kaliganga are flowing above danger mark following rains since Thursday night. Communication and power lines were disrupted and traffic along several roads, including national highways, in the area has been blocked due to landslides, officials said. The local administration has sought the assistance of the Army in view of the large-scale destruction caused by the cloudburst in Rudrap rayag district.

Radiation / Nuclear

Yukio “There is no immediate effect on health” Edano, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry who will have technically lost his portfolio on nuclear issues come September 19 (when the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Goshi Hosono’s ministry takes over the nuclear regulatory oversight from NISA), approved the resumption of construction of two new reactors.

So much for the Noda administration’s “pledge” to have zero nuclear power plant operating in 2030. (We’re just shocked. Shocked, aren’t we?)

On September 15, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yukio Edano held a meeting in Aomori City with Governor of Aomori Prefecture Shingo Mimura and the mayors of municipalities where nuclear facilities are located, and told them that he would allow the resumption of construction and operation of Ooma Nucleaer Power Plant by Electric Power Development Co.,Ltd. (in Ooma-cho, Aomori Prefecture) and Reactor 3 of Shimane Nucleaer Power Plant by Chugoku Electric Power Company (in Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture).

両原発の建設が再開されれば、震災後初めての原発建設となる。

It would be the first construction of nuclear reactors after the March 11, 2011 disaster.

In the “Revolutionary strategy for energy and environment” that was agreed upon on September 14, the national government clearly set the target to have zero nuclear reactors operating in 2030. If the government rule of 40 years of operation is applied, these nuclear reactors would be allowed to operate into 2050, which would be a contradiction to the new energy strategy.

Mr. Edano said in the meeting, “As to the nuclear power plants with permits for installing a reactor and for construction plan, we as Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry are not thinking of any change”, indicating the intention to allow the resumption of construction and operation once the Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirms safety. The Commission will be installed on September 19.

In addition to Ooma Nuclear Power Plant and Reactor 3 of Shimane Nuclear Power Plant, Reactor 1 of Higashidori Nuclear Power Plant is also under construction by TEPCO (in Higashidori-mura, Aomori Prefecture). However, Mr. Edano said of Higashidori’s Reactor 1, “TEPCO is not in a position yet to discuss nuclear energy”, indicating that the resumption of construction of Higashidori Reactor 1 would be unlikely at this time.

Space

Electromagnetic Event: Magnetic Pole Shift Could Be In Progress

There are two dangers presented in this video: 1) The Electromagnetic Event; and 2) The Mega Solar Flare & CME – Music: Instrumental “Soul Survivor” by Akon & Young Jeezy

HAARP:
Emotional & behavioral suppression technology, Silent Sound Spread Spectrum technology, and weather modification are dangerous, unethical, a secret in their truest form, and don’t have a damn thing to do with HAARP — This is what you should know:
1) Things not caused by HAARP: Long Solar Minimum, Jupiter/Saturn Storms, Saturn/Venus Rotation Anomalies, New Radio Emission from Jupiter, Uranus Auroras, the ENA ribbon, and most importunely, earth’s shifting N pole and fading Magnetic Shield. [There is a natural event taking place]
2) Weather Modification that is not HAARP: Radar Rings are different [local VLFs can do it without any help from HAARP], see video called ‘Standing Wave Tank” to see how LF work better on water vapor than HF. Some rings are man made with VLF, others are a natural effect of the EM event; I believe we are trying to stop it.
3) Potential Danger of HAARP: Over-ionization of certain layers or regions, Creating Ozone holes, Increasing our Solar Vulnerability.
4) ****HAARP and the Russian/Norwegian Devices are directly under the auroral electrojet, which is the thing that would kill our grids in a solar storm. The devices are ionospheric heaters capable of expanding the electrojet and scattering the energy.

NIBIRU:
What can I say, there is no star coming in here. That would kill us, and wouldn’t have left any planets here if it had come before. The term ‘dark star’ is a misnomer, it’s not so dark you wouldn’t see it. There IS a possibility that we could see a crossing ‘planet’, but not a star. Here are those possibilities, google will help fill in the blanks.
1) Hypothetical Planet Vulcan [not star trek] happens to be real and comes out from behind the sun.
2) Rogue Planet enters our system. [they outnumber stars in our galaxy]
3) Planetary ‘Birthing’ process where a baby planet comes out of the Sun, Saturn, or Jupiter.
4) A Return to the World described in ‘Symbols of an Alien Sky’
[All but #2 could be lumped in together as caused by an electromagnetic event; I worry this is what is happening now– Sitchen made many documented errors, and it was the Maya, not the Sumerians, who spoke of 2012]

Biological Hazards / Wildlife / Hazmat

The highly infectious and sometimes fatal Foot and Mouth Disease infections have been traced in livestock in the Nyingtri region of central Tibet. According to the regional agricultural ministry, a total of 123 live head of cattle and 108 pigs have showed symptoms associated with FMD. After collecting samples, the Chinese National Foot-and-Mouth Disease Reference Laboratory on Thursday confirmed that the livestock were infected with type O FMD. The local authorities have “sealed off and sterilised the infected area, where a total of 612 head of cattle and pigs have been culled and safely disposed of in order to prevent the disease from spreading since the case was confirmed.” While “quietly sending military troops to kill and burry the cattle,” Chinese authorities did not reveal the outbreak to the public. “Insiders say the provincial officials ordered the cover-up in fear that their records might be affected. Further investigation confirmed the disease to be a special type of FMD resistant to the current vaccine.” Following an outbreak of FMD in China’s eastern provinces of Shandong and Jiangsu, which later spread to suburban Beijing in 2005, China had for the first time reported FMD outbreak to the World Health Organisation. FMD is an acute contagious febrile disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals, including domestic and wild bovids. The disease can potentially cost huge economic loss to farming and nomadic families who make their living from livestock.

A large portion of the southside of MIshawaka, Ind. was evacuated overnight after a chemical spill. Firefighters were called to 1302 Industrial Drive just after 8 p.m. after receiving a call of smoke coming out of a vacant building. The building used to be the home of Baycote Metal Finishing. After the fire was out, a firefighter noticed a low hanging vapor cloud in the building and immediately evacuated the area. The area includes about fifty homes, including an assisted living center. WSBT reports about 200 people were evacuated. The Red Cross set up a shelter for evacuees. Residents reported irritated skin and itchy eyes. Officials say this will be a major clean-up effort. This is a developing story. We will continue to update this story as more information becomes available.

The Czech Republic has banned the sale of spirits with more than 20 percent alcohol content as it battles a wave of methanol poisonings that has already killed 19 people. Health Minister Leos Heger says the unprecedented ban is effective immediately and applies nationwide. It covers all possible sales locations, including restaurants, hotels and stores. Kiosks and markets had earlier been banned from selling spirits with more than 30 percent alcohol content. In a brief announcement late Friday, Heger said the measure was taken as the death toll from the poisonings reached 19 and the first person was hospitalized in Prague. Dozens of people have been hospitalized, some in critical condition after drinking vodka and rum laced with methanol. The problem appears largely centered in northeastern Czech Republic.

June 4, 2012 – PANAMA – A shallow 6.6 magnitude earthquake struck the sea-floor just SW of Panama. The earthquake was preceded by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake in the same region. The strong magnitude earthquakes erupted along the jagged corner of the Nazca plate which is subducting under the South American plate. The epicenter of the quakes was 230 miles (370 km) south of David, Panama, at a depth of 6.0 miles (10.5 km). There was no tsunami threat, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. The quake was reported to have occurred at 6:45 local time (0045 GMT). Yesterday, the same region was rattled by a 4.7 earthquake at a depth of about 10.5 km. A low level tsunami alert was issued for the region but was later canceled. –The Extinction

(AGI) There has been a fall in the number of earthquake tremors recorded in areas across the provinces of Mantova, Modena and Ferrara, where two earthquakes on May 20 and 29 tore devastated churches and businesses, leaving a total of 19 people dead.
Between 07:00 and 13:00 today, Italy’s institute for the monitoring of seismic activity (INGV) recorded 6 tremors, compared to several dozen over the same period of time in recent days. The magnitude of the tremors is also falling and in recent hours has not risen above 2.6 on the Richter Scale. .

Extreme Temperatures/ Weather

Heavy rainfall has been sweeping across parts of Northern and Northeast China. The storms caused traffic delays and many flights have been delayed or cancelled. Beijing received a huge sudden downpour at around 3pm Sunday, local time. The clouds were so heavy that the capital almost fell into darkness. Some vehicles became stranded on the roads, and the storm prompted officials to declare a “Blue alarm” – the lowest emergency level. Northeast China also suffered torrential rain, with thunder and hail storms. Some areas saw over 50 millimeters of rainfall within just 2 hours. Parts of the country’s south also suffered severe storms. Weather forecasters say the bad weather could last another 3 or 4 days. It’s prompting fears that flooding could occur along the country’s waterways.

A heavy sandstorm blinded much of the Eastern Province yesterday. There were, however, no reports of major road accidents or any delay in train or flight arrivals and departures. The storm started blanketing the region since Saturday night, as sand-laden winds exceeding 25 mph made life difficult for motorists, who drove with hazard lights on as they negotiated their way through the thick balls of yellow and orange dust. People awoke to a dark and hazy morning yesterday with their vehicles coated in layers of coarse dust. Visibility was reduced to zero during noontime in Dammam, Dhahran and Alkhobar. All vehicles had headlights on, and it looked more like evening than afternoon. Evening found roadways around Dammam nearly deserted. Many businesses, especially supermarkets, suffered from the storm. There was a steady stream of people at local hospitals, with the sandy weather bringing nothing but misery to children with asthma. “My seven-year-old son is suffering badly because of this weather,” said Umm Javed, a mother of three. “Since we live on the third floor, this gushing sand-laden wind is particularly fierce and it is making breathing difficult for my little one,” she told.

Severe weather that rolled through eastern Colorado has caused some damage. The storms started early Saturday along the Front Range with powerful wind gusts that broke branches and downed some trees in the Denver area. KUSA-TV reports that Buckley Air Force Base had 61 mph winds, while gusts hit 67 mph at Denver International Airport. The station reports that as the storms moved to the east the damaging wind continued with several locations in Morgan County reporting trees down and damage to fences and automobiles. By 9 p.m. all of the watches and warnings for severe weather had expired.

Afternoon winds are being blamed for helping a wildfire burning in a remote area of the Sequoia National Forest nearly double in size. U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Denise Alonzo says the winds Sunday afternoon pushed the fire over control lines, helping it expand to more than 1,000 acres. Earlier Sunday the fire had consumed about 522 acres. About 250 firefighters are battling the blaze, which was first reported around 4 p.m. Friday. No structures are threatened by the blaze. The wildfire has crossed Lloyd Meadow Road, a dead-end road that provides access to two trailheads into the Golden Trout Wilderness area, a remote area that spans both sides of the Sierra crest. The exact cause of the fire is under investigation, but officials have determined it was caused by a human, though it’s not known if the fire was sparked accidentally.

(Reuters) – High winds, heavy rains and six tornadoes have descended on the mid-Atlantic region, causing at least one serious injury but no deaths and damaging homes, businesses and boats, officials said on Saturday.

The violent storms that struck Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia on Friday collapsed a fabric dome near Pittsburgh, stranded motorists on flooded roads, and ruined homes and boats.

The National Weather Service said in a post on Twitter late on Saturday that six tornadoes had been confirmed as part of the weather outbreak. No other details were immediately available.

One man in Bel Air, Maryland, near Baltimore suffered broken bones when the concrete block wall of his automotive garage business collapsed on him during the storm. Another man inside the garage had minor injuries, Edward Hopkins of the Maryland Emergency Management Agency said.

An alert employee evacuated 11 others from the fabric golf dome at Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania a minute before winds caused it to collapse on Friday. They escaped unhurt, the university said in a statement.

Tens of thousands of people lost power in Washington and its Maryland suburbs on Friday, but outages were down to around 250 customers by Saturday, said Myra Oppel, a spokeswoman for Potomac Electric Power Company.

“It was really nasty weather,” Oppel said in a telephone interview. “I’ve never heard so many tornado warnings.”

Baltimore Gas and Electric Company also had tens of thousands of customers lose power, though all but roughly 2,500 customers had their power restored, the company said on its website.

Flash flooding along the Interstate 95 corridor inundated roads and stranded motorists, some of whom had to be rescued, said Howard Silverman of the National Weather Service in Maryland.

Experts were out determining whether tornadoes had caused the damage, Silverman said.

Witnesses said it was definitely a tornado that struck Hampton, Virginia, where 100 homes, three businesses and some yachts sustained damage.

The damage in Hampton, a city of 150,000, was estimated at $4.3 million, city spokeswoman Robin McCormick said.

“There are trees on roofs, and tarps, it’s really a mess,” McCormick said. Boats in a parking lot were tossed off their trailers, she said.

Residents were being kept out of two hard-hit neighborhoods where crews were replacing downed power poles and clearing debris that blocked roads.

Despite the storm, Hampton held its annual “Blackbeard Pirate Festival” for thousands of visitors on Saturday, McCormick said.

000
WEPA42 PHEB 040322
TIBPAC
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 0322Z 04 JUN 2012
THIS BULLETIN APPLIES TO AREAS WITHIN AND BORDERING THE PACIFIC
OCEAN AND ADJACENT SEAS...EXCEPT ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...
WASHINGTON...OREGON AND CALIFORNIA.
... TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN ...
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY.
THIS BULLETIN IS ISSUED AS ADVICE TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. ONLY
NATIONAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE
DECISIONS REGARDING THE OFFICIAL STATE OF ALERT IN THEIR AREA AND
ANY ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN IN RESPONSE.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0315Z 04 JUN 2012
COORDINATES - 5.4 NORTH 82.7 WEST
DEPTH - 10 KM
LOCATION - SOUTH OF PANAMA
MAGNITUDE - 6.6
EVALUATION
NO DESTRUCTIVE WIDESPREAD TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS BASED ON
HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.
HOWEVER - EARTHQUAKES OF THIS SIZE SOMETIMES GENERATE LOCAL
TSUNAMIS THAT CAN BE DESTRUCTIVE ALONG COASTS LOCATED WITHIN
A HUNDRED KILOMETERS OF THE EARTHQUAKE EPICENTER. AUTHORITIES
IN THE REGION OF THE EPICENTER SHOULD BE AWARE OF THIS
POSSIBILITY AND TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE PRODUCTS
FOR ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...WASHINGTON...OREGON...CALIFORNIA.

Epidemic Hazards / Diseases

Outbreak precautions are in effect at The Norfolk Hospital Nursing Home due to a respiratory-like illness. There are currently five residents showing two or more of the following symptoms; headache, cough, runny nose, fever, chills and sore throat. The Resident Yard Sale, which was scheduled for Saturday, has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date. Other precautions include resident isolation, increased cleaning, signage, halt to activities and a freeze on new admissions and transfers. Visiting is still permitted at this time, however, if you are feeling ill the staff asks you to stay at home. Guests are remaindered to wash their hands at one of the many hand sanitizing stations available before entering the nursing home.

Biohazard name:

Respiratory-like illness

Biohazard level:

3/4 Hight

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.

A new strain of flu from the northern hemisphere is likely to spread through Australia this winter, NSW health authorities say. Centre for Health Protection director Dr Jeremy McAnulty says the new flu strain (H3N2) is likely to replace swine flu that emerged in 2009 as the dominant strain. Pregnant women, the elderly and the chronically ill should be vaccinated. ‘This may mean that people in older age groups … may be at greater risk this winter,’ Dr McAnulty said in a statement on Monday. ‘We are already seeing a rise in activity … so now is the time to get vaccinated.’ Free flu shots are available for people aged 65 and older, pregnant women, people with chronic illness as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Dr McAnulty said parents should arrange flu vaccinations for children older than six months, who were at relatively high risk of severe influenza.

Biohazard name:

Flu (New strain observed)

Biohazard level:

3/4 Hight

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.

Earth

ScienceDaily — The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully shed light on processes up to 3 billion years ago, the theory isn’t sufficient in explaining the dynamics of Earth and crust formation before that point and through to the earliest formation of planet, some 4.6 billion years ago. This is the conclusion of Tomas Naæraa of the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a part of the University of Copenhagen. His new doctoral dissertation has just been published by the journal Nature.

“Plate tectonics theory can be applied to about 3 billion years of the Earth’s history. However, the Earth is older, up to 4.567 billion years old. We can now demonstrate that there has been a significant shift in the Earth’s dynamics. Thus, the Earth, under the first third of its history, developed under conditions other than what can be explained using the plate tectonics model,” explains Tomas Næraa. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Copenhagen)

“Using radiometric dating, one can observe that Earth’s oldest continents were created in geodynamic environments which were markedly different than current environments characterised by plate tectonics. Therefore, plate tectonics as we know it today is not a good model for understanding the processes at play during the earliest episodes of Earths’s history, those beyond 3 billion years ago. There was another crust dynamic and crust formation that occurred under other processes,” explains Tomas Næraa, who has been a PhD student at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland — GEUS.

Plate tectonics is a theory of continental drift and sea floor spreading. A wide range of phenomena from volcanism, earthquakes and undersea earthquakes (and pursuant tsunamis) to variations in climate and species development on Earth can be explained by the plate tectonics model, globally recognized during the 1960’s. Tomas Næraa can now demonstrate that the half-century old model no longer suffices.

“Plate tectonics theory can be applied to about 3 billion years of the Earth’s history. However, the Earth is older, up to 4.567 billion years old. We can now demonstrate that there has been a significant shift in the Earth’s dynamics. Thus, the Earth, under the first third of its history, developed under conditions other than what can be explained using the plate tectonics model,” explains Tomas Næraa. Tomas is currently employed as a project researcher at GEUS.

Central research topic for 30 years

Since 2006, the 40-year-old Tomas Næraa has conducted studies of rocks sourced in the 3.85 billion year-old bedrock of the Nuuk region in West Greenland. Using isotopes of the element hafnium (Hf), he has managed to shed light upon a research topic that has puzzled geologists around the world for 30 years. Næraa’s instructor, Professor Minik Rosing of the Natural History Museum of Denmark considers Næraa’s dissertation a seminal work:

“We have come to understand the context of the Earth’s and continent’s origins in an entirely new way. Climate and nutrient cycles which nourish all terrestrial organisms are driven by plate tectonics. So, if the Earth’s crust formation was controlled and initiated by other factors, we need to find out what controlled climate and the environments in which life began and evolved 4 billion years ago. This fundamental understanding can be of great significance for the understanding of future climate change,” says Minik Rosing, who adds that: “An enormous job waits ahead, and Næraas’ dissertation is an epochal step.”

A big dark hole in the sun’s atmosphere, a ‘coronal hole’, is turning toward Earth spewing solar wind. According to NASA’s official rubber chicken, it looks an awful lot like a bird:

Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. A chicken-shaped stream of solar wind flowing from this coronal hole will reach Earth on June 5th – 7th, possibly stirring geomagnetic storms. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras

New sunspot 1496 unleashed an impulsive M3-class solar flare on June 3rd at 1755 UT. In New Mexico, amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft was monitoring the sun when the explosion occurred, and he video-recorded a powerful solar tsunami issuing from the blast site:

“This was a great solar event!” says Ashcraft. “The blast wave sparked powerful radio emissions as it plowed through the sun’s atmosphere, and I recorded the sounds using my shortwave radio telescope.”

The explosion also hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space: SOHO movie. The cloud does not appear to be heading for Earth, although this conclusion could be revised by further analysis

Space

On June 4th, the full Moon will pass through the shadow of Earth, producing a partial lunar eclipse visible across the Pacific side of Earth from Asia to North America. In the United States, the event is visible during the hours before sunrise on Monday morning. The eclipse begins at 3:00 a.m. PDT and reaches maximum at 4:03 a.m. PDT with 38% of the Moon’s diameter in shadow. Get the full story and a video from Science@NASA.

Venus is approaching the sun in advance of the June 5th Transit of Venus. From here on Earth, the second planet has become difficult to see wrapped in bright sunlight. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, however, has no such trouble. SOHO’s onboard coronagrah blocks the glare to reveal planets otherwise invisible:

A 24-hour movie shows that Mercury is exiting stage left as Venus plunges deeper into sunlight. Updated images may be found here.

Amateur astronomers who manage to locate Venus in broad daylight will find that the planet has turned into a delightfullyslendercrescent. This is happening because Venus is turning its nightside to Earth, with only a sliver of reflected sunlight still shining over the planet’s limb.

The crescent could soon become a ring. When Venus is less than few degrees away from the sun, the horns of the crescent sometimes reach around and touch, producing a complete annulus. The effect is caused by particles in upper layers of Venus’s atmosphere which scatter sunlight around the circumference of the planet. The ring is very difficult to observe, and often only black-belt astrophotographers are able to record the phenomenon.

Only 4 billion years before a gigantic collision will take place between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy. NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s painstaking Telescope measurements are ready.

“After nearly a century of speculation about the future destiny of Andromeda and our Milky Way, we at last have a clear picture of how events will unfold over the coming billions of years,” said Sangm Tony Sohn of The Space Telescope Science Institute.

“Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy,” said Roelandvan der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

Andromeda, known also as M31 is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it’s is approaching us very fast. It’s inevitably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.

It will be a great clash and the Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during this encounter.

The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the two largest in our cosmic neighborhood. Our Galaxy’s spiral disk of 200 billion stars, is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter; Andromeda is 4 times as massive and contains 500 billion stars.

Our solar system is approximately 28,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way; Andromeda is around two million light years away.

Click on image to enlargeThis series of photo illustrations shows the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.
First Row, Left: Present day; First Row, Right: In 2 billion years the disk of the approaching Andromeda galaxy is noticeably larger; Second Row, Left: In 3.75 billion years Andromeda fills the field of view; Second Row, Right: In 3.85 billion years the sky is ablaze with new star formation; Third Row, Left: In 3.9 billion years, star formation continues; Third Row, Right: In 4 billion years Andromeda is tidally stretched and the Milky Way becomes warped;Fourth Row, Left: In 5.1 billion years the cores of the Milky Way and Andromeda appear as a pair of bright lobes;Fourth Row, Right: In 7 billion years the merged galaxies form a huge elliptical galaxy, its bright core dominating the nighttime sky. Credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas, and A. Mellinger
Computer simulations derived from Hubble’s data show that it will take an additional two billion years after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe.

It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much further from the galactic core than it is today.

And what will happen with Andromeda’s small companion, the Triangulum galaxy, M33?

M33: Triangulum GalaxyThe small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and our own Milky Way. About 3 million light-years from the Milky Way, M33 is itself thought to be a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy and astronomers in these two galaxies would likely have spectacular views of each other’s grand spiral star systems. As for the view from planet Earth, this sharp, detailed image nicely shows off M33’s blue star clusters and pinkish star forming regions that trace the galaxy’s loosely wound spiral arms. In fact, the cavernous NGC 604 is the brightest star forming region, seen here at about the 1 o’clock position from the galaxy center. Like M31, M33’s population of well-measured variable stars have helped make this nearby spiral a cosmic yardstick for establishing the distance scale of the Universe. Photo Credits: Paul Mortfield, Stefano Cancelli
It will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair but astronomers estimate that M33 will hit the Milky Way first.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s deep views of the universe show such encounters between galaxies were more common in the past when the universe was smaller.

A century ago astronomers did not realize that M31 was a separate galaxy far beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble measured its vast distance by uncovering a variable star that served as a “milepost marker.

Hubble went on to discover the expanding universe where galaxies are rushing away from us, but it has long been known that M31 is moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 miles per hour.

That is fast enough to travel from here to the moon in one hour. The measurement was made using the Doppler effect, which is a change in frequency and wavelength of waves produced by a moving source relative to an observer, to measure how starlight in the galaxy has been compressed by Andromeda’s motion toward us.

Previously, it was unknown whether the far-future encounter will be a miss, glancing blow, or head-on smashup. This depends on M31’s tangential motion. Until now, astronomers had not been able to measure M31’s sideways motion in the sky, despite attempts dating back more than a century.

The Antennae Galaxies in CollisionTwo galaxies are squaring off in Corvus and here are the latest pictures. When two galaxies collide, however, the stars that compose them usually do not. This is because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small amount of that space. During the slow, hundred million year collision, however, one galaxy can rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. In the above clash of the titans, dark dust pillars mark massive molecular clouds are being compressed during the galactic encounter, causing the rapid birth of millions of stars, some of which are gravitationally bound together in massive star clusters. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute) et al.
The Hubble Space Telescope team, led by van der Marel, conducted extraordinarily precise observations of the sideways motion of M31 that remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way.

“This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period,” said Jay Anderson.

“In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits,” said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York.

“The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits. The galaxies’ cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy,” Besla added.

The space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble upgraded it with ever more-powerful cameras, which have given astronomers a long-enough time baseline to make the critical measurements needed to nail down M31’s motion.

The Hubble observations and the consequences of the merger are reported in three papers that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Mysterious Booms / Rumblings

Investigations Still Underway On The

Unexplaned “Boom” Sounds, South West Michigan 5-27-2012 WWMT

News Report from event Sunday May 27th 2012. Michigan is a new location for this phenomenon to have been recorded. And this particular account is perhaps the first involving physical damage clearly associated with the phenomenon. The damage in question I believe is located in Oshtemo Michigan near Kalamazoo.

Biological Hazards / Wildlife

Swarms of spiders descending from nowhere and biting those unfortunate enough to stray into their path sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But for people in one Indian town, the scenario is all too real. Two people are said to have died after being bitten by the poisonous creatures in Sadiya, in the north east of India. And scores more have been treated in hospital after the town was suddenly invaded by the poisonous eight-legged creatures last month, which have left residents living in a state of panic. Now worried local officials are considering spraying the town with insecticide to kill off the menace, after experts have so far failed to identify the species. A scientist, who is one of those now camping in the area in an attempt to tackle the dangerous spiders, described the creatures in question as ‘highly aggressive’. Dr Saika, told the Times of India that the arachnid could even belong to a whole new species. He said: ‘It leaps at anything that comes close. Some of the victims claimed the spider latched onto them after biting, and if that is so, it needs to be dealt with carefully.’ Rumours are rife that the spiders could be any of a number of poisonous arachnids, including possibly a tarantula, a black wishbone, or even the feared funnel-web spider.

Experts are also concerned that the spider epidemic is being made worse by the influence of witch doctors in the town. Dr Anil Phatowali, a superintendent at Sadiya’s local hospital, said that both of those who died had first sought the treatment of witch doctors, who had cut open the wounds with razors and drained out the blood before burning it. Residents have spoken of their shock at the sudden invasion of spiders who entered the town whilst Hindu festival celebrations were in full swing last month. Jintu Gogoi, who was one of those bitten by the spider, told how he suffered excruciating pain and nausea after being attacked, with his finger still blackened and swollen weeks later. Whatever the identity of the mystery spiders, experts agree that the creatures are unlikely to be native to the area. Researchers are also still running tests to discover how poisonous the spiders are after medical chiefs questioned the authenticity of the bite claims. Dr. Anil Phatowali, superintendent of the town’s hospital, said they had not administered an antidote as they could not be certain the spider was venomous at all, pointing to the treatment by witchdoctors as a possible factor in the two recorded deaths.

A man swimming in the ocean was injured after officials said he was bitten by a shark Saturday evening at Myrtle Beach. The victim was coming out of the water around 7:45 p.m. near the 2nd Avenue Pier, with a shark attached to his foot. Beach Patrol Sgt. Philip Cane confirmed the bite. Witnesses said the victim appeared to be in his late teens or early 20s. The photo of his shark bite was taken by a friend. The extent of the injuries remains uncertain. No other information was released.

The risk of a deadly tsunami ravaging the United States is now leading scientists to investigate hazards posed by giant earthquakes off the Alaskan coast.

Scientists are concentrating on the Alaskan-Aleutian subduction zone, where the tectonic plate underlying the Pacific Ocean is diving underneath the continental plate underlying North America. Tsunamis can be caused by earthquakes, especially large ones, and the second-largest recorded earthquake in history was a magnitude 9.2 at this zone in 1964.

“It concerns us a lot that we might have deadly waves aimed at U.S. shores,” said geophysicist David Scholl, an emeritus scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey at Menlo Park, Calif., who discussed the work in Eos, a publication from the American Geophysical Union.

Traveling tsunamis

The fear is that a tsunami caused by a major earthquake along this zone could race across the Pacific Ocean and devastate highly populated areas of the U.S. West Coast, as well as Hawaii.

“We’ve been focusing on tsunami risks since 2004, when the Banda-Aceh earthquake and tsunami led to a loss of about 250,000 lives, and then the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and tsunami claimed another 20,000 or so people and caused a nuclear disaster,” Scholl told OurAmazingPlanet.

“Tsunamis show us that you may have an earthquake in one part of the world that visits damage on areas thousands of miles away.”

For instance, a tsunami in 1946 generated by a magnitude 8.6 temblor on the Alaskan-Aleutian subduction zone near Unimak Pass, Alaska, caused significant damage along the West Coast, claimed 150 lives in Hawaii, and inundated shorelines as far away as the South Pacific islands and Antarctica.

“These waves can travel at 500 mph [700 kph],” Scholl said. “From the Aleutians, a tsunami could get to Hawaii in four or five hours, two or three hours to get to Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and the California coast. And they don’t lose much energy as they go.

The waves aren’t horribly high as they travel over the deep ocean, only a meter [3 feet] or so, but when they get to the coast, in shallow waters they grow in height to dozens of meters, and in places like Long Beach harbor in California, they’d cause rapid currents that can tear up the harbor area.”

Next big one

It remains uncertain where the next tsunami generated along this zone might occur. It appears unlikely that a quake as large as the magnitude 9.2 event in 1964 will happen again soon — the interval for such major quakes is about 900 years.

However, the areas between the Shumagin and Fox Islands on the zone may cause trouble, Scholl said. In addition, the last time the Semidi Islands section of the zone experienced a great earthquake was in 1938, a magnitude 8.2 event, and enough time has passed for strain to build up for another major temblor. Indeed, satellite analysis of the area suggests the shallower portion of this section is accumulating strain at a high rate.

Research is under way to examine the ancient history of tsunamis on several of the Aleutian Islands by looking at layers of sediment there.

The hope is to yield insights on how often tsunamis recur there and to link these deadly waves to specific earthquakes to better model the potential deadliness of tsunamis based on the magnitudes and locations of the earthquakes that cause them. Such research is key to building effective defenses against tsunamis. [History’s Biggest Tsunamis]

“When it came to the Fukushima disaster in Japan, they designed a sea wall to handle a tsunami, but they ended up lowballing how high the wave would be,” Scholl said. “You have to know how bad tsunamis have been to know what to prepare for.”

A fresh look at sedimentary evidence suggests the 900-930 AD rupture of the Seattle fault possibly produced a larger earthquake than previously recognized. The Seattle fault zone, a series of active-east-west trending thrust faults, poses seismic threat to the Puget Sound region.

The 900-930 AD rupture is the only known large earthquake along the Seattle Fault, making geological records of prehistoric events the only clues to the earthquake potential of the fault.

While a graduate student at the University of Washington, Maria Arcos looked at tsunami and debris flow deposits – both evidence of a paleo-quake – in the coastal marsh at Gorst, Washington. She also identified evidence of at least three meters of uplift that preceded a tsunami, which was followed by a sandy debris flow from Gorst Creek, and suggests that the 900-930 AD quake covered a greater geographic area than previous fault interpretations.

The revised height and width of deformation caused by the quake may influence current interpretations of the Seattle fault’s structure. This study found a minimum of three meters of uplift at Gorst, which is double the amount of previous fault models for the same location. A broader zone of deformation, says Arcos, may indicate either a wider zone of slip along the dip of the fault, a shallower dip or splay faults farther to the south.

The National Emergency Commission (CNE) on Wednesday declared a preventive “green alert” due to recent seismic activity at three volcanoes. “The CNE’s alert is supported by reports from technical and scientific agencies that note the volcanoes are in constant activity,” the commission stated. Emissions of gas at Rincón de la Vieja Volcano has seen significant volcanic activity. Despite the warning, access to the volcanoes will remain open to the public, but visitors must follow guidelines issued at each national park’s entrance.

The National Emergency Commission (CNE) on Wednesday declared a preventive “green alert” due to recent seismic activity at three volcanoes. “The CNE’s alert is supported by reports from technical and scientific agencies that note the volcanoes are in constant activity,” the commission stated. Emissions of gas at Poás Volcano are expected to increase. Despite the warning, access to the volcanoes will remain open to the public, but visitors must follow guidelines issued at each national park’s entrance.

The National Emergency Commission (CNE) on Wednesday declared a preventive “green alert” due to recent seismic activity at three volcanoes. “The CNE’s alert is supported by reports from technical and scientific agencies that note the volcanoes are in constant activity,” the commission stated. Turrialba Volcano, 70 kilometers east of the capital, has seen significant volcanic and seismic activity in recent months, prompting the National Seismological Network to upgraded its own color threat level to yellow. Despite the warning, access to the volcanoes will remain open to the public, but visitors must follow guidelines issued at each national park’s entrance.

Forecasters had predicted that up to 4 inches could fall on parts of South Carolina on Tuesday, although dry air began to wrap into the system in Georgia and by late in the day, the forecast called for only about 2 inches of new rain.

Rain would be welcome along the South Carolina coast after what has been a warm winter and dry spring. Rainfall in the Charleston area is about 4 inches below normal for the year.

Prior to Wednesday’s tornado damage, reports from the National Weather Service indicated that damage from Beryl seemed confined to downed trees and branches.

One person, an 18-year-old who went swimming off Daytona Beach on Monday evening, died in the rough surf.

Msnbc.com’s Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Some 3,000 people living in the towns of Palena and Futaleufu, in the southern Chilean region of Los Lagos, on Wendesday remained isolated because of a mudslide that buried the road leading to the area, authorities said.

The mudslide, about 120 meters (390 feet) long and 20 meters (65 feet) deep, occurred late Tuesday during a storm that affected the area, in the vicinity of Villa Santa Lucia, some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) south of Santiago.

That is what Andres Ibaceta, the regional head of the National Emergency Management Office, or Onemi, told local media, adding that although the road link for the affected communities with the rest of Chile had been interrupted, the border pass to Argentina is open.

“You can’t get to Palena from the Chilean side, although it is possible from the Argentine side,” said Ibaceta, while the Highway Department said that the effort to clear the road could take between two and three days.

Ibaceta emphasized that the weather conditions had improved in recent hours, something that he said will enable work crews to accelerate the clearing of mud, rocks and other debris from the road.

The storm also resulted in power outages and the loss of telephone communications, a situation that authorities said they had resolved over the past few hours.

The front of bad weather that affected several regions of Chile over the past few days left two people dead and 3,542 with some sort of property damage, according to figures compiled by Onemi. EFE

Landslides triggered by rains have snapped the road link between Gangtok and Tsomgo Lake, leaving about 4000 tourists stranded near 15 Mile, en route to Tsomgo Lake and Nathu la in Sikkim. Officials said that visitors from all over the country on way to the lake and Nathu La have been put up in shelters provided by the Army at their bases beyond 15 Mile. The tourists were stuck after boulders fell on the main Jawaharlal Nehru Road, the link between Gangtok and Tsomgo Lake, yesterday. Lukendra Rasaily, president, Travel Agents Association of Sikkim (TAAS) said the boulders started falling on the road after 2 PM yesterday and at around 4 PM it got totally blocked after another landslide struck above 15 Mile. Many of the tourists who had reached the spot before the landslide were, however, lucky to make it to Gangtok.Some of the tourists braved it across the slide through other alternative routes to reach Gangtok, but the route was fraught with danger in view of fading light and continuous rains, Rasaily said. Border Road Organisation officials were working round-the -clock on re-opening the route depending on the weather, the sources said, adding last September’s tremor, 6.9 on Richter scale, could have loosened the ground underneath and continuing rains then resulted in the landslide. The alternative route via Rongli and Rhenock will be used to evacuate the tourists if the main route takes longer to be restored. Yesterday, was the first day of the week when Nathu la was open to tourists as any traffic upto the Indo-China border remains closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Epidemic Hazard/Diseases

Chagas, a tropical disease spread by insects, is causing some fresh concern following an editorial—published earlier this week in a medical journal—that called it “the new AIDS of the Americas.”

More than 8 million people have been infected by Chagas, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States.

The editorial, published by the Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.

“There are a number of striking similarities between people living with Chagas disease and people living with HIV/AIDS,” the authors wrote, “particularly for those with HIV/AIDS who contracted the disease in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.”

Both diseases disproportionately affect people living in poverty, both are chronic conditions requiring prolonged, expensive treatment, and as with patients in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, “most patients with Chagas disease do not have access to health care facilities.”

“It likes to bite you on the face,” CNN reported. “It’s called the kissing bug. When it ingests your blood, it excretes the parasite at the same time. When you wake up and scratch the itch, the parasite moves into the wound and you’re infected.”

“Gaaah,” Cassie Murdoch wrote on Jezebel.com, summing up the sentiment of everyone who read the journal’s report.

Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, kills about 20,000 people per year, the journal said.

And while just 20 percent of those infected with Chagas develop a life-threatening form of the disease, Chagas is “hard or impossible to cure,” the Times reports:

The disease can be transmitted from mother to child or by blood transfusion. About a quarter of its victims eventually will develop enlarged hearts or intestines, which can fail or burst, causing sudden death. Treatment involves harsh drugs taken for up to three months and works only if the disease is caught early.

“The problem is once the heart symptoms start, which is the most dreaded complication—the Chagas cardiomyopathy—the medicines no longer work very well,” Dr. Peter Hotez, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the editorial’s authors, told CNN. “Problem No. 2: the medicines are extremely toxic.”

And 11 percent of pregnant women in Latin America are infected with Chagas, the journal said.

http://www.ibioseminars.org/lectures/global-health-a-energy/norma-andrews.html
Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania are closely related intracellular protozoan parasites that cause serious diseases throughout the world. In the first part of this lecture, I will present background material on the biology of Trypanosoma cruzi and the history of its discovery as an important agent of human disease in Latin America. I will also discuss the main characteristics of the disease, and the current efforts to stop human transmission.

In contrast, the Milky Way’s center shows little activity. But it wasn’t always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the Milky Way’s central black hole was much more active in the past.

“These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago,” said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

“They strengthen the case for an active galactic nucleus in the Milky Way’s relatively recent past,” he added.The two beams, or jets, were revealed by NASA’s Fermi space telescope. They extend from the galactic center to a distance of 27,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. They are the first such gamma-ray jets ever found, and the only ones close enough to resolve with Fermi.

The newfound jets may be related to mysterious gamma-ray bubbles that Fermi detected in 2010. Those bubbles also stretch 27,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. However, where the bubbles are perpendicular to the galactic plane, the gamma-ray jets are tilted at an angle of 15 degrees. This may reflect a tilt of the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole.

“The central accretion disk can warp as it spirals in toward the black hole, under the influence of the black hole’s spin,” explained co-author Douglas Finkbeiner of the CfA. “The magnetic field embedded in the disk therefore accelerates the jet material along the spin axis of the black hole, which may not be aligned with the Milky Way.”

The two structures also formed differently. The jets were produced when plasma squirted out from the galactic center, following a corkscrew-like magnetic field that kept it tightly focused. The gamma-ray bubbles likely were created by a “wind” of hot matter blowing outward from the black hole’s accretion disk. As a result, they are much broader than the narrow jets.

Both the jets and bubbles are powered by inverse Compton scattering. In that process, electrons moving near the speed of light collide with low-energy light, such as radio or infrared photons. The collision increases the energy of the photons into the gamma-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The discovery leaves open the question of when the Milky Way was last active. A minimum age can be calculated by dividing the jet’s 27,000-light-year length by its approximate speed. However, it may have persisted for much longer.

“These jets probably flickered on and off as the supermassive black hole alternately gulped and sipped material,” said Finkbeiner.

It would take a tremendous influx of matter for the galactic core to fire up again. Finkbeiner estimates that a molecular cloud weighing about 10,000 times as much as the Sun would be required.

“Shoving 10,000 suns into the black hole at once would do the trick. Black holes are messy eaters, so some of that material would spew out and power the jets,” he said.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

For more information, contact:

David A. Aguilar
Director of Public Affairs
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
617-495-7462
daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu

A moderate solar flare on May 17 lit up ground stations all over the world with an unexpected and puzzling pulse of high-energy particles. It should not have happened, and scientists are now trying to figure out why it did.

Major solar flares, flashes of light at various wavelengths often associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are known to disrupt communications and can even trip power grids on Earth. But the May 17 flare was an M-class event, moderate and relatively common and not expected to create disturbances on the surface of Earth. Yet either the flare or the CME generated a ground-level enhancement (GLE), a blast of high-energy particles that lit up ground stations called neutron monitors on Earth for the first time in nearly six years.

Scientists don’t expect an M-class flare to create a GLE.

“This solar flare was most unimpressive and the associated CME was only slightly more energetic,” said James Ryan, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire Space Science Center (SSC). “And looking at it optically, it was remarkably dim, it was, all things considered, a 98-pound weakling of solar events.”

Data on the event was captured by the European satellite called PAMELA, or Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics. Ryan is a co-investigator on the PAMELA mission, and hopes the spacecraft data will reveal how the high-energy particles morphed on their way to Earth and resulted in the mysterious GLE.

Scientists don’t know if the extremely energetic particles registered on the ground are the results of a shockwave in front of a CME or if the particles come from the solar flare itself.

“The PAMELA satellite provides us with a bridge that has never existed before,” says Ryan, “a bridge between solar energetic particles measured by other spacecraft and those made on the ground by neutron monitors.”

Until the data is studied, however, the May 17 event remains a mystery.

This illustration shows the collision paths of our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. The galaxies are moving toward each other under the inexorable pull of gravity between them. Also shown is a smaller galaxy, Triangulum, which may be part of the smashup. (Credit: NASA; ESA; A. Feild and R. van der Marel, STScI)

(Phys.org) — NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy

The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

“Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy,” said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

The solution came through painstaking NASAHubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31. The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.

“After nearly a century of speculation about the future destiny of Andromeda and our Milky Way, we at last have a clear picture of how events will unfold over the coming billions of years,” said Sangmo Tony Sohn of STScI.

The scenario is like a baseball batter watching an oncoming fastball. Although Andromeda is approaching us more than 2,000 times faster, it will take 4 billion years before the strike.

Computer simulations derived from Hubble’s data show that it will take an additional two billion years after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe.

Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today.

This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as it will unfold over the next several billion years. In this image, representing Earth’s night sky in 3.75 billion years, Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the Milky Way with tidal pull. (Credit: NASA; ESA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger)

To make matters more complicated, M31’s small companion, the Triangulum galaxy, M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first.The universe is expanding and accelerating, and collisions between galaxies in close proximity to each other still happen because they are bound by the gravity of the dark matter surrounding them. The Hubble Space Telescope’s deep views of the universe show such encounters between galaxies were more common in the past when the universe was smaller.

A century ago astronomers did not realize that M31 was a separate galaxy far beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble measured its vast distance by uncovering a variable star that served as a “milepost marker.”

Hubble went on to discover the expanding universe where galaxies are rushing away from us, but it has long been known that M31 is moving toward the Milky Way at about 250,000 miles per hour. That is fast enough to travel from here to the moon in one hour. The measurement was made using the Doppler effect, which is a change in frequency and wavelength of waves produced by a moving source relative to an observer, to measure how starlight in the galaxy has been compressed by Andromeda’s motion toward us.

Previously, it was unknown whether the far-future encounter will be a miss, glancing blow, or head-on smashup. This depends on M31’s tangential motion. Until now, astronomers had not been able to measure M31’s sideways motion in the sky, despite attempts dating back more than a century. The Hubble Space Telescope team, led by van der Marel, conducted extraordinarily precise observations of the sideways motion of M31 that remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way.

“This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period,” said Jay Anderson of STScI.

“In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits,” said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York, N.Y. “The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits. The galaxies’ cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy.”

The space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble upgraded it with ever more-powerful cameras, which have given astronomers a long-enough time baseline to make the critical measurements needed to nail down M31’s motion. The Hubble observations and the consequences of the merger are reported in three papers that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

Biological Hazards/Wildlife

One person has skin lesions and 16 animals have died in an anthrax outbreak in northern Colombia, near the Venezuelan border.

A notification on the website for the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said the outbreak has affected two farms in the department of La Guajira. Colombia’s Agriculture Ministry sent the information to the OIE on May 28.

The source of the deadly bacteria has not yet been determined, the report said. One of the affected populations “belongs to an indigenous community in the department of La Guajira,” the notice states.

“The community has been informed of the protocol to be applied to dispose of the carcasses, mainly the fact that, under no circumstances, the dead animals must be neither manipulated nor consumed,” the report said.

Humans commonly contract anthrax through close contact with infected animals or eating ones that have died from the disease.

“Susceptible species are being vaccinated. An intense epidemiological surveillance is being conducted in the area together with the public health authorities,” the notification continued.

The animals will be also be quarantined in response to the outbreak.

Three goats, three sheep and two pigs have died from the outbreak on one farm. Another five goats and two pigs have died on a separate farm.

Anthrax, also used as a biological weapon, is caused by the spore-forming bacteria Bacillus anthracia, the OIE website states. The disease causes dark ulcers on the skin of infected people when contracted from exposure to infected animals, and it occurs on all the continents.

“Anthrax spores in the soil are very resistant and can cause disease when ingested even years after an outbreak,” the OIE stated. “The bacteria produce extremely potent toxins which are responsible for the ill effects, causing a high mortality rate.”

The last anthrax outbreak in Colombia was in April 2011. An outbreak in 2010 caused the government to declare a state of emergency in La Guajira after 77 people developed lesions, a common symptom of the disease.

Articles of Interest

The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Fukushima, Japan, last year wreaked havoc in the skies above as well, disturbing electrons in the upper atmosphere, NASA reported.

The waves of energy from the quake and tsunami that were so destructive on the ground reached into the ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere that stretches from about 80 to 805 kilometres above Earth’s surface.

The ionosphere is the last, thinnest part of the atmosphere, where solar ultraviolet radiation breaks up molecules and leaves a haze of electrons and ions.

In images released on Friday, NASA showed how the earthly disturbances from the March 11, 2011, quake and tsunami were echoed in the movement of electrons far aloft. This movement was monitored by tracking the GPS signals between satellites and ground receivers.

Scientists have seen this phenomenon before, for tsunamis in Samoa in 2009 and Chile in 2010. The Japanese event, however, occurred in a region more closely monitored by a dense network of GPS receivers, NASA said in a statement.

The world is running out of drinkable water, and if you don’t believe me, just go to the movies. Documentaries with names such as Tapped and Thirst are at the leading edge of the new genre – the eco-disaster film – that have become our main source of information about our collapsing environment.

Last Call at the Oasis is a slick addition, a kind of report card on the state of what it calls the single most important element, although I don’t know what consideration they gave to air. Water is becoming a scarce commodity, and what’s left is becoming more and more polluted: by industrial waste, chemicals and the poo of a million farm animals. Droughts plague the world. Half of the hospital beds are taken up with people suffering form water-borne illnesses.

As one of the film’s experts, Jay Famiglietti, puts it, “We’re screwed.”

Eventually, Last Call at the Oasis does find reason for hope: We can use recycled water, for instance, if we can get people over their initial reluctance to drink something that started in the toilet (the film proposes an ad campaign for a product it calls Porcelain Springs water, “from the most peaceful place on earth”) and even in the Middle East, traditional enemies are co-operating to clean the sad polluted trickle that is the Jordan River.

Until then, though, director Jessica Yu (Breathing Lessons) takes us on a smoothly produced tour of the terrible things we’ve done to ourselves. Based on the Alex Prud’homme book, The Ripple Effect, the movie assigns much of the blame for the water crisis to America, and the contrast between the dancing fountains of Las Vegas and the surrounding desert is an instructive metaphor. Vegas is close to Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, which is dropping by 10 feet a year; by 2025, it could be dry. Meanwhile, Las Vegas (population two million) is pondering a $3-billion pipeline to Baker, Nev. (population 150), a lush town that now stands to lose its water supply.

But that’s only the start. “We’re all Vegas,” someone says, and Last Call at the Oasis tours other impending disasters: the Central Valley of California, where a quarter of American food is grown; Australia, where a decade of drought is destroying agriculture.

After a brief course in water usage (most domestic use is taken up by the toilet; there’s a hidden cost of water, so that four pounds of steak requires 18,000 gallons of the stuff, enough to fill the average swimming pool), Last Call brings in Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist whose fight against industrial pollution in Hinkley, Calif., became a hit movie. Brockovich, an engagingly straightforward expert, becomes the spokeswoman for another aspect of the crisis: the cocktail of birth control pills, steroids, antibiotics and other industrial contaminants in our water.

There’s no end to the troubles, including the herbicide Atrazine, which is blamed for causing male frogs to become females. The “safe level” of Atrazine in drinking water is 30 times the level that causes the sex change.

We also visit Michigan, where huge farms called Concentrated Animal Feed Operations pour tons of animal waste into lagoons that leach into the surrounding countryside. One cow can produce 150 pounds of manure a day, 23 times the average human output, although they never met my Uncle Myron.

The solution isn’t bottled water – an industry that has spawned documentaries of its own – but recycling and conservation. Last Call at the Oasis is just the latest call for such action, and in its accumulation of evidence, it really does feel like we’re nearing the end.

jstone(at)postmedia.com

canada.com/stonereport

CAPSULE -Last Call at the Oasis: A documentary about the impending water crisis that looks at the droughts, shrinking reservoirs and increasing pollution and scratches around for hope. “We’re screwed,” says one expert, but the film – which is slickly produced – proposes reasonable solutions. three stars out of five – Jay Stone

Authorities said there was no threat of a tsunami, and that the worst-hit area was the town of Ransiki in western Papua, where students attending morning classes ran from school buildings that shook for around a minute.

“We’ve had reports of mostly superficial damage to buildings, but two houses have caved and a church wall has collapsed,” Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) official Yulson Sineri, told AFP.

“There are so far no reports of victims, but there has been some damage to buildings in Ransiki,” he said.

The quake struck at 10:16 am (0116 GMT) at a depth of 30 kilometres (19 miles), 83 kilometres southeast of Manokwari, according to the USGS.

Authorities said the quake was felt in various parts of the West Papua province, on the western tip of New Guinea island.

The BMKG reported the quake’s magnitude at 6.8, with a depth of 10 kilometres.

A hotel receptionist at the Mansinam Beach Resort in Manokwari reported a minute of shaking, but said she saw no damage.

“All our guests panicked and ran out of the building, but they went back after the quake was over and everything is back to normal as far as I can see,” Anita, who goes by one name, told AFP.

The Papua region was struck by two mild aftershocks, while a 6.1-magnitude quake hit off Sumatra island, with no reports of damage or casualties.

Earlier on Saturday, a strong 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck off Indonesia’s Sumatra island on Saturday, the US Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued.

The quake struck at 5:14 am (2314 GMT Friday) at a depth of about 34 kilometres (21 miles), 427 kilometres southwest of Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. There were no immediate reports of damage.

Aceh province was shaken earlier this month by two huge earthquakes, triggering an Indian Ocean-wide tsunami alert.

At a magnitude of 8.6, the first of the two quakes was the strongest to hit since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 170,000 in Aceh. No major damage was reported.

The alert level was raised from yellow to orange in March as the volcano became increasingly active. Last week a column of gas and steam approximately 1,200 meters tall extended from its crater.

The national director of the firefighting system warned that there is urgent need for a special contingency plan that outlines tactics to be used in emergency volcanic situations, especially for search and rescue groups. He called for a focus on high risk areas in or near the paths of rivers that originate in the Ruiz, whose levels may be elevated by pyroclastic fragments and the melting of ice.

The director of the Colombian Fire Department Federation in the town of Riosucio explained that local firemen are preparing a plan and educating communities.

In 1985 The Nevado del Ruiz erupted, wiping out the town of Armero and killing 25,000 people.

A 17,886ft volcano outside Mexico City has exhaled dozens of towering plumes of ash and shot fragments of glowing rock down its slopes, frightening the residents of surrounding villages with hours of low-pitched roaring not heard in a decade.

A white cloud of ash, gas, water vapour and superheated rock spewed from the cone of Popocatepetl high above the village of Xalitzintla, whose residents said they were awakened by a window-rattling series of eruptions.

Mexico’s National Disaster Prevention Centre said that a string of eruptions had ended in the early morning, then started up again at 5.05am, with at least 12 in two hours.

“Up on the mountain, it feels incredible,” said Aaron Sanchez Ocelotl, 45, who was in his turf grass fields when the eruptions happened. “It sounds like the roaring of the sea.”

The white cone of Popo, as most call the mountain, is an iconic backdrop to Mexico City’s skyline on clear days, but its 40-mile distance means even a moderately large eruption is unlikely to do more than dump ash on one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.

It is a different matter for the villages on the flanks of the volcano, where the quiet of the corn fields and fruit orchards was pervaded by the volcano’s spooky roaring.

“Everyone needs to take this seriously. This buzzing, this roaring isn’t normal,” said Gregorio Fuentes Casquera, the assistant mayor of Xalitzintla, a village of 2,600 people about seven miles from the summit. He said the town had prepared 50 buses and was sending out its six-member police forces to alert people to be ready to evacuate.

Dozens of women lined up in Xalitzintla’s main square to get free face masks and bottles of water. Health authorities were giving out 10 masks and 10 bottles of water to each family, and the surgical-style masks, intended to filter out the fine ash released by the volcano, were becoming common among the town’s students, who are required to wear them in school. Few adults wore them.

President Felipe Calderon said live on national television that authorities are keeping open roads around the mountain, preparing emergency shelters and making sure residents know the latest information about a potential eruption.

Authorities this week raised the alert level due to increasing activity at the volcano, whose most violent eruption in 1,200 years occurred on December 18 2000. More than 30 million people live within view of the volcano, which sits at a point where the states of Mexico, Puebla, and Morelos come together. It has been erupting intermittently since December 1994.

Radiation/Nuclear

An adverse decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will force parties concerned about the already troubled Vogtle nuclear reactor project in Georgia to file a motion this week in federal court, according to representatives of nine organizations that are seeking to slow down the Vogtle project so that necessary post-Fukushima safety enhancements can be taken into account on the front end – before billions of ratepayer dollars are spent.

In a phone-based news conference held just hours after the NRC rejection of their motion to stay construction, the groups explained that the NRC is violating federal law by issuing the Vogtle license without fully considering important public safety and environmental implications of the catastrophic Fukushima accident in Japan.

The new court proceeding would unfold against a backdrop of more than 30-plus license changes for the Vogtle reactors that Southern Company has said are needed and that the nine groups believe may result in possible delays and cost overruns.

The nine groups are the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Center for a Sustainable Coast, Citizens Allied for Safe Energy, Friends of the Earth, Georgia Women’s Action for New Directions, North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Nuclear Watch South, and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

They have asked federal judges to order the NRC to prepare a new environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed Vogtle reactors that would detail how cooling systems for the proposed reactors and spent fuel storage pools would meet new regulatory requirements in light of the Fukushima accident to protect the site, and nearby communities, against earthquakes, flooding and prolonged loss of electric power to the site.

Post-Fukushima safety requirements may also lead to a change in the economics of the Vogtle project compared to other energy alternatives.

Sara Barczak, High Risk Energy Choices program director, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said: “As evidenced by today’s NRC decision, regulators unfortunately continue to ignore the real ramifications that this risky, expensive nuclear project could have on utility customers and local communities. There are serious safety and economic concerns that will eventually come to a front. Before billions more dollars are spent, post-Fukushima issues should be dealt with in order to best protect surrounding communities and ratepayers’ pocketbooks.”

Diane Curran, Harmon, Curran, Spielberg and Eisenberg, L.L.P., attorney for organizations, said: “The NRC predicts we are going to lose our case in federal court and therefore it refuses to order the suspension of construction at Vogtle while our court case proceeds. But the NRC only digs itself in deeper with this decision, which confirms that the NRC applied the wrong standard in refusing to supplement the EIS for Vogtle to address the environmental implications of the Fukushima accident – whether there was an ‘imminent risk’ of a Fukushima-like accident.

“But that is not the correct standard for whether a supplemental environmental analysis should be required. The standard is whether there is a significant risk of a severe accident sometime during the operating life of the reactor – not tomorrow.”

Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said: “In denying a stay of the license, the Commission completely ignored our principal concern about the harm that will be caused by going ahead with construction now – that the costs of Fukushima-related backfits that may be required will be much greater after construction starts than if that issue is settled before construction, which is what we ask. The NRC gave short shrift to the interests of the public and specifically the ratepayers who are bearing the risks of Vogtle 3 and 4.

“For instance, the NRC ignored its own statements, as recent as January 2012, that the frequency of earthquakes of a given ground motion in the eastern region is now estimated to be higher than before. The Commission has failed to learn the lessons of the more than one hundred reactors to which it gave construction licenses in the 1970s that were later cancelled at great damage to ratepayers and the public in general in part because safety-related backfits were needed once construction had begun.”

Rev. Charles Utley, Environmental Justice coordinator, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, said: “As residents living within view of Plant Vogtle, we oppose the siting yet another nuclear plant in our backyard. For years we have participated in public hearings, legal actions and many other tactics to slow, stop and reverse this fundamental injustice. For our children, our homes and our community, we will never give up.”

Curran added: “The decision also vividly illustrates how NRC tries to have it both ways, telling the public to ‘trust us’ that it is taking the Fukushima accident seriously, at the same time it refuses to be accountable to the public by supplementing the environmental impact statement for Vogtle or by even holding a hearing on whether it should be supplemented.

“Attendance at the only hearing the NRC has held on the question of whether the NRC should supplement the environmental study for Vogtle was limited to Southern Nuclear Operating Co. and the NRC technical staff. The NRC would not let the public participate and refused these groups’ request for a hearing on the very same issue. We should have learned from the Japanese accident that such a cozy relationship between industry and government regulators leads to complacency and poor regulatory decisions.”

In February, the groups asked the NRC to delay construction of the new Vogtle reactors until the court decided their case. Since the NRC refused their request today, they will re-file the stay motion on construction with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit later this week. They contend that construction should not be allowed until the NRC decides whether the proposed new reactors should be re-designed to provide for more rigorous protection against earthquakes and extended power outages.

To build reactors that might need to be significantly modified later and extensively backfitted in light of new post-Fukushima regulatory requirements risks wasting ratepayer dollars, causing unnecessary pollution, and even possible abandonment of the project.

Solar Activity

2MIN News Apr20

On April 18th and 19th, a series of minor CMEs puffed away from the sun. Three of them are heading in our general direction. Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab have prepared an animated forecast track of the ensemble.

According to the forecast, the clouds are going to hit Mercury, Earth, Mars and rover Curiosity en route to Mars. The impact on our planet, on April 22nd around 00:50 UT, is expected to be minor with auroras likely only at higher latitudes.
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Racing outward at about one-quarter the speed of light, “bullets” of ionized gas are thought to arise from a region located just outside the black hole’s event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape.

Using the Very Large Baseline Array and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite, an international team of astronomers have successfully managed to capture a detailed image of the black hole eruption.

The Very Large Baseline Array is a set of 10 radio telescopes that spans 5,000 miles from Mauna Kea in Hawaii to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It provides astronomers with the sharpest vision of any telescope on Earth or in space.

A black hole in the constellation Scorpius is firing fast cosmic bullets.“If your eyes were as sharp as the VLBA, you could see a person on the moon,” said physicist Gregory Sivakoff of the University of Alberta.

“Like a referee at a sports game, we essentially rewound the footage on the bullets’ progress, pinpointing when they were launched,” said Gregory Sivakoff of the University of Alberta in Canada.

Discovered by NASA’s HEAO-1 satellite in 1977, the system is composed of a normal star and a black hole of modest but unknown masses.Their orbit around each other is measured in days, which puts them so close together that the black hole pulls a continuous stream of matter from its stellar companion.

The flowing gas forms a flattened accretion disk millions of miles across, several times wider than our sun, centered on the black hole.

As matter swirls inward, it is compressed and heated to tens of millions of degrees, so hot that it emits X-rays.

Some of the infalling matter becomes re-directed out of the accretion disk as dual, oppositely directed jets.

This weekend, NASA scientists, amateur astronomers, and an astronaut on board the International Space Station will attempt the first-ever 3D photography of meteors from Earth and space.

“The annual Lyrid meteor shower peaks on April 21-22,” says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “We’re going to try to photograph some of these ‘shooting stars’ simultaneously from ground stations, from a research balloon in the stratosphere, and from the space station.”

Articles of Interest

Vietnam has asked the World Health Organization to help investigate a mystery disease that has killed 19 people and left 171 others sick.

Le Han Phong, chairman of the People’s Committee in Ba To district in Quang Ngai province, said patients first experience a rash on their hands and feet along with high fever, loss of appetite and eventually organ failure.

He said nearly 100 people remain in hospital, including 10 in critical condition. Patients with milder symptoms are being treated at home.

Mr Phong said the first case was detected last year and that the disease had died down until a spate of new infections were recently reported, mostly in one impoverished village.

Hanoi has asked the World Health Organization for help to cure a virulent disease affecting children. Symptoms include blistering on hands, feet and mouths accompanied by high fever and eventual organ failure.

­Nineteen children died from the illness in 2011 alone.

The virus spreads through direct contact with an infected person’s oral discharges or saliva, the fluid from burst blisters or the stool of infected persons.

The Red Cross mission in Vietnam reports the disease has already infected over 28,000 children this year, which is more than 10 times the number of infected children in the same period last year.

According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), last year a record 110,000 children became infected, with 169 deaths.

The hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) disease mostly affects children under three years old (80 per cent of totals cases) the Red Cross said. There is no known treatment for HFMD.

Human HFMD differs from a similar foot-and-mouth disease affecting cattle, sheep, and pigs.

The virus was first detected last year in central Vietnam. Initially the disease died away, but later many new infections were reported. Most of those infected are from one impoverished villages.

Last year HFMD killed 19 people, reportedly most of them children. One hundred and seventy-one people were hospitalized, 10 in a critical condition. Some patients get milder symptoms and are able to be treated at home.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Health launched a fruitless investigation.

In previous years the registered HFMD cases were mild and most patients recovered after a maximum 10 days, but the new virulent strain EV71 has developed into a fatal disease.

The IFRC say it needs $840,000 to sponsor a program preventing the spread of the disease.

Vietnamese authorities are conducting a campaign to improve sanitation and hygiene practices in internal migrant families living in densely-populated areas.

Cases of HFMD are also on increase in other Asian countries, including Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

Salem – The Salem witch tragedy of 1692 took less than two years to play out. Yet 300 years later, explanations for how and why it happened are still coming.

One theory recently gaining exposure thanks to bloggers comes from a 2004 college thesis that places the blame on something we think of as a strictly modern phenomenon: climate change.

Proposed in a Harvard thesis, the paper by economist Emily Oster has earned attention due to the modern swirl of controversy surrounding the possibility that human interaction has altered world temperatures.

Currently an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Oster linked periodic outbreaks of violence against people accused of witchcraft with dramatic temperature drops.

“The most active period of the witchcraft trials (mainly in Europe) coincides with a period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the ‘little ice age,'” Oster wrote. “The colder temperatures increased the frequency of crop failure, and colder seas prevented cod and other fish from migrating as far north, eliminating this vital food source for some northern areas of Europe.”

When crops failed, “people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns,” she wrote. Thus, desperate people traced their troubles to unpopular neighbors and outcasts allied to the devil.

Oster noted that the persecutions “spread even across the Atlantic Ocean to Salem, Massachusetts.”

Moreover, she added, “The coldest segments of this ‘little ice age’ period were in the 1590s and between 1680 and 1730.”

San Diego – In the western San Bernardino Mountains, near the highway that links Los Angeles and Las Vegas, scientists recently discovered a geological mystery: colossal rocks perched in precarious poses right next door to the San Andreas Fault.

It’s not the rocks’ balancing act that is perplexing, said Lisa Grant Ludwig, a scientist who presented this puzzle to colleagues this week here at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America.

It’s how the rocks have managed to stay that way with such an aggressive maker of powerful earthquakes just a few miles away.

March 2, 2012 – BOLIVIA – The San Calixto Observatory director of La Paz, Estela Minaya confirmed that there is a small rise of magma (molten rock in the form of lava and gases) from the volcano Uturuncu, however, but immediately rule out a possible eruption. Minaya told the Red Erbol said now one of the purposes of the Observatory is to trace the progression of the volcano and to determine how high and fast magma is rising inside the volcano. “Then, (known) that the molten material begins to rise and generates what is seen as a strain at the surface. Studying this method indicates what kind of deformation and “growth,” the volcano is experiencing. Right now, indication there is a slight rise but the magma is rising at a very low speed. Now that this ‘growth’ isn’t very large and can’t generate a volcanic eruption,” he said. He noted that this work takes place two years ago with the interferometer system and the last eruption in Uturuncu would have registered more than 1.6 million years or so. A week ago, was reported in boliviaprensa.com international scientists are studying the changes introduced Uturuncu volcano, since satellite measurements show that the mountain has been growing at a rate of 1.3 centimeters per year over the past two decades. –Erboltranslated

Bangladesh reports its fourth human H5N1 case
Bangladesh has reported its fourth human case of H5N1 avian flu infection, involving a 40-year-old man who works in a live bird market in Dhaka, the capital. After the man sought medical care for a cough, polymerase chain reaction testing of respiratory samples identified the infection, according to a Feb 27 statement from the Bangladesh Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control, and Research (IEDCR). The patient is now symptom-free, the statement said. Bangladesh’s first human H5N1 case was reported in 2008, and two more cases were identified last year. None of the cases have been fatal. The World Health Organization (WHO) has not yet recognized the case. The WHO’s current global H5N1 count stands at 589 cases with 348 deaths.
Feb 27 IEDCR statement
Feb 28 WHO cumulative H5N1 case count

H5N1 hits backyard poultry in BhutanBhutan has reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu affecting backyard poultry, according to a report from the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) today. The outbreak, in Chakha district, killed 35 birds in January, and 86 additional poultry were culled to prevent disease spread. A national laboratory confirmed the disease via real-time polymerase chain reaction on Jan 10. The report did not specify why officials delayed reporting the outbreak to the OIE. Chakha is in southwestern Bhutan and borders the West Bengal district of India. Bhutan last experienced an H5N1 outbreak in December, according to the OIE.
Mar 1 OIE report

Report: H1N1 hitting harder than H3N2 in 4 European countriesAlthough pandemic 2009 H1N1 (pH1N1) has made up only 1% of flu viruses circulating in France, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom this flu season, it has accounted for 10% of hospital cases and a high percentage of severe cases, according to a report today in Eurosurveillance. Of 1,432 sentinel specimens analyzed from the four countries, 14 (1%) were pH1N1 and 1,219 (85%) were H3N2. But of 199 lab-confirmed hospitalized cases, 20 (10%) were caused by pH1N1, compared with 108 (54%) caused by H3N2. And of the hospitalized pH1N1 patients, 19 (95%) were admitted to intensive care, compared with 33 (30%) for H3N2. In the previous flu season (2010-11), the share of hospitalized pH1N1 cases was only 1.5-fold higher than the share of cases in the community, according to the report.
Mar 1 Eurosurveillance report

Study details better 2009 H1N1 immune response in seniorsAn in-depth study in the Journal of Virology on antibody response shed more light on why fewer older people got sick during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Researchers with the US Food and Drug Administration and the University of Pittsburgh used a host of advanced antibody testing methods to analyze extra serum samples from a wide age range of patients that were collected at two Pittsburgh hospitals and pediatric outpatient clinics during the second wave of the pandemic before vaccination began. They also conducted similar tests on ferrets that were infected with the virus to gauge the development of antibodies. Infection with pH1N1 in adults older than 70 induced antibodies with broader epitope recognition in internal genes and hemagglutinin 1 (HA1) receptor binding domain compared with younger age-groups. The findings support the hypothesis that older people have long-term memory B cells and possibly long-lived plasma cells that cross-reacted with the novel virus and were rapidly recruited and activated following infection. They wrote that the cells could have undergone somatic hypermutation during earlier exposure to H1N1 viruses that circulated until the 1957-58 flu season or that exposure to or vaccination against 1976 swine flu could have generated long-term memory B cells that cross-reacted with the pH1N1 virus.
Feb 29 J Virolabstract

Raw milk Campylobacter outbreak total reaches 80 casesAn outbreak of Cambylobacter illness associated with raw milk from a Pennsylvania dairy has grown to 80 cases, according to Food Safety News (FSN) today. The total represents an increase of 3 cases since CIDRAP News last reported on the outbreak Feb 16. Case totals by state are now: Pennsylvania, 70; Maryland, 5; West Virginia, 3; and New Jersey, 2. At least nine patients have been hospitalized, and the last known illness onset date is Feb 1. The outbreak has been traced to Your Family Cow dairy in Chambersburg, which halted sales of raw milk products Jan 27 but was allowed to resume production Feb 6 after passing inspections.
Mar 1 FSN story
Feb 16 CIDRAP News Scan on outbreak

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